Interview by Denise Levertov with Susan Rowe

SOURCE: An interview in The Craft of Poetry: Interviews from "The New York Quarterly," edited by William Packard, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1974, pp. 79-100.

In this interview, originally published in New York Quarterly, Levertov explains her method of writing and also discusses various influences on her poetry, including teaching, religion, and politics.

[Rowe]: What stories or poems from your childhood reading do you remember particularly? Which ones do you think may have had an influence on your development as a poet?

[Levertov]: Well, it's always difficult to know what did and what didn't affect your work later. My mother read aloud to me a great deal when I was a child, even after I was reading to myself. She read Beatrix Potter, whom I consider a great stylist, the Andrew Lang fairy books, Hans Andersen. She...